We have a wrap around porch at our farm house that was in terrible shape when we bought the house 8 years ago. At that time, I fixed it up the best that I could in what I now call “porch version 1.0”. This entailed adding railings, fixing some floor boards, and putting up screen. At the time, my tool collection consisted of a hammer, a miter saw, and the world’s most dangerous portable table saw. I may have had some screw drivers too. This was long before I had any of the skills that I’ve since developed. While porch 1.0 was terribly executed, and I cringe at its crudity, we’ve enjoyed the heck out of it.
My vision of porch 3.0 (yes, I know I skipped 2.0... we'll get to that in a minute) is very well developed at this point. I know most of the steps of the project plan, and how I’ll pull it all together. We’ll ultimately end up with a 3+ season room (we won’t quite use it full year, but will be able to get some spot winter use out of it) that’s nicely appointed and fits our lifestyle. We got some quotes and confirmed that I’ll be doing that build, but finances won’t allow it for probably about 2 more years.
Which brings us to porch 2.0 which is underway now. The goals of this project are to make the porch nice enough to function and present well enough to tide us over until porch 3.0 can become a reality. Since 3.0 will begin with a complete gut of the existing structure, we wanted to spend almost nothing to “spruce it up”. All told, the entire porch 2.0 project will total about $500. Not too shabby.
So far, I replaced a bunch of rotten floor boards and reconfigured a railing section to accept a new screen door. Once our pool, and accompanying gravel patio areas, are installed in a few weeks, I’ll add stairs with a railing to take you to the grill/cooking area, and also allow easy access to swimming or hanging out by the fire pit.
As part of step 1, we also painted the entire ceiling a very light tan color. While you can still see the nails that hold the shingles on poking through, and while we didn’t do 2 coats or aim for perfection, the overall effect of “brightening the space” is dramatic. To really take set it off, I re-ran all the existing electric to a much more useful setup. We have ample light now (on dimmer switches) and a nice double ceiling fan to help cool it off during summer.
The last steps of the porch 2.0 project are to repaint the posts and railing for a nice clean look, repair some ripped screen (using the leftovers from Mom and Dad’s project), and strip and repaint the floor boards.
So far we feel like the effort will definitely pay off when the warm weather comes, and we’ll be able to put off the sunroom build for a couple more years until finances can rebound a bit.
And, as always, the barn full of tools and equipment has been extremely helpful throughtout the effort so far.
I dread the day I get different neighbors and they turn out to be tools. 
If they are small jobs, payment by beer is usually sufficient, lol
